


Small Things

by BG97



Category: Stray Kids (Band)
Genre: ??? - Freeform, Ableism, Alternate Universe, Anxiety, Anxiety Attacks, Cancer, Eventual Happy Ending, Friends to Lovers, Hospitals, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Pain, Possibly Incorrect Medical References, Slow Burn, Terminal Illnesses, internalized ableism, situational depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-17
Updated: 2019-04-18
Packaged: 2020-01-15 16:50:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,717
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18503062
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BG97/pseuds/BG97
Summary: Felix's whole world shattered when he received his diagnosis; Chris thinks he might be able to help pick up the pieces.(Tags will be updated as necessary)





	1. Felix Lee

**Author's Note:**

> Okay! I tried to tag everything I could think of that might be triggering in this work, but may have missed something. I’m not sure if the tags are really an accurate representation of this, and they're definitely incomplete in case I want to change anything that I have planned, but I wanted to be really careful. What I have in mind for this is more happy than sad (like the tags suggest), but you should still take them seriously.
> 
> This is a story I wrote to deal with some personal emotions; a lot of this is based on the experiences of too many close friends and family members. I did a lot of research to try and use accurate terminology and make the treatments and situations described as realistic and accurate as possible, but a lot is still based on my personal experiences with those dealing with cancer so it might be different from what someone else has witnessed or experienced themselves or what someone might consider to be a typical experience.
> 
> That out of the way, I hope everyone enjoys!

Felix had first noticed the pain shortly before his senior dance recital.

 

It was easy to write off, at first, and when it got worse, anyone he talked to about it also dismissed it as a consequence of Felix spending countless hours overexerting himself in the practice room. It only made sense, after all; He was pretty sure there hadn’t been a day in the past few years that his body hadn’t hurt somewhere.

 

So, Felix pushed through it. He gave a near perfect performance at the recital and was back in the practice room the next day to prepare for university auditions.

 

It really didn’t affect him too much, it was more bothersome than anything; an uncomfortable, constant ache just below his left knee that was just insistent enough to make it difficult to ignore.

 

It was weeks before his dance teacher asked him to have it looked at. She’d told Felix he wouldn’t be allowed to practice until he’d gotten a doctor to clear him, assuming it was, at worst, just a minor stress fracture. He figures he should probably take the time to genuinely thank her, someday.

 

Felix isn’t really sure when it hit him; sometime during the countless doctors’ visits, specialist appointments, tests, scans, and teary-eyed conversations with his parents and sisters, it began to sink in that his life, as he knew it, was over.

 

He remembers the first time he caught his mother crying, how she hugged him and tried to tell him that everything would be okay even as she wiped the tears from her swollen eyes. He remembers the first time a doctor put an official name to the pain in his leg: Osteosarcoma, though almost everyone just called it “the cancer” from then on, so Felix guesses it doesn’t really matter. He remembers the first time someone mentioned the word ‘amputation’ to him, how the syllables had bounced senselessly around his head for days afterwards. He remembers the first time he had to explain to someone, in his own words, what was going on with him, how numb and disconnected he felt as they rubbed his back and promised to pray for him and his family. He remembers the first time he cried, tucked alone under the covers of his bed, hand muffling his sobs because his little sister was a paper-thin wall away and he refused to let her hear.

 

He guesses it was a process, him realizing that this was real, that he actually had cancer, that everything he’d always thought he’d be, had dreamed of, had been gradually stolen away from him without him even realizing what was happening or doing a single thing to stop it.

 

Felix didn’t go to school anymore; the principal had basically told him he would still graduate with the rest of his class because of his “special circumstances”. He didn’t really want to keep going to school, like everything was fine, like he was fine, but it might be better than sitting alone with his thoughts at home.

 

He had started avoiding his friends early on; no one knew what to say and it was pretty obvious that he made them uncomfortable. With his friends from school, Felix has a vague idea that they weren’t exactly the type of friend group that’s built to handle being supportive during emotionally traumatic events. They just eat lunch together and argue about their favorite animes so they were totally unprepared to find out that he had cancer; it was awkward and that wasn’t what Felix needed right now.

 

It was a lot harder with his friends from dance. He and Hyunjin had been dancing at the same studio for the past few years and they had been best friends for just as long. Felix figures that there are certain moments in life when you need your best friend and he’s pretty sure finding out you have cancer is one of them. The problem is that, especially right after he got the news, Felix was really, really angry and really, really fucking sad, and the last thing he wanted to talk about was his cancer. And it isn’t fair, but Hyunjin represents all these things that Felix could be if he wasn’t sick and all the things he misses about not knowing. So, when Felix finally stops ignoring his texts and agrees to meet up and get smoothies at their favorite spot about two weeks after he was diagnosed, it was uncomfortable as hell. 

 

Hyunjin knows better than anyone how devastating it is for him to be told that he can’t dance anymore, but he still can’t possibly understand. He’s still making his way through the university auditions they’d been preparing for together just a few short weeks before; he doesn’t know what it’s like to be so close to everything you’ve always planned on and then suddenly have that taken from you. It just isn’t fair, and Felix knows that none of this is remotely Hyunjin’s fault, but it doesn’t make it any easier to sit across a table from him and act like everything’s the same as it’s always been.

 

It just isn’t.

 

He doesn’t know how to answer when Hyunjin asks how he’s doing and he doesn’t have it in him to ask Hyunjin how things have been going at the studio, so they find other things to talk about, but it’s hard in a way that talking with Hyunjin has never been. Felix knows that his friend is scared for him, that he’s also hurting, in a way, but it just makes things worse. Felix doesn’t want pity, he wants what Hyunjin has.

 

They sit there for an hour or so, both trying really hard to smile and joke around like they normally do, but it keeps dissolving into an uncomfortable silence, each glancing away as they slowly sip their drinks. It’s awkward and stupid and he really hates that, after everything they’ve been through together, this is what breaks them.

 

Hyunjin starts crying when they’re saying goodbye and it makes Felix’s gut clench, but he doesn’t know what to say so he stays quiet. They hug for too long and Felix is pretty sure he’s a horrible person for just wanting it to be over. He wasn’t ready to deal with any of this.

 

So, when Hyunjin texts him later that night, Felix doesn’t respond. The same goes for the rest of his friends and teachers at the studio; Felix wasn’t ready to accept that everyone else was going to have to move on without him, so he cut them off completely.

 

The hurt was still there. He missed the studio and everyone there a lot, and not just because he was starting to spend way too much time alone, or anything. 

 

He misses laughing when Hyunjin would scramble in late for every practice, misses the stupid comments and jokes they’d make back and forth about each other’s routines, misses how genuinely funny it was whenever his friend would forget the steps and freeze in place. He even misses Hyunjin’s teasing when Felix would keep making the same mistakes in a routine he’d been working on for weeks or the exasperated smile on their teacher’s face when she’d insistently remind them and everyone else to focus and stop talking. 

 

He misses late night fast food runs with the team after a particularly brutal practice and the bad memes and inside jokes that’d get spammed in their group chat. He misses the feeling of his overheated body being splayed across the hardwood floor, the ache in his shaky muscles as he pushed himself through his post-practice stretching routine, the intense satisfaction of finally locking down the steps of a new choreography.

 

But it didn’t matter what he wanted, what made him happy, how he felt; everyone had collectively agreed that Felix was ‘too sick’ to do any of it. It hurt all the more because, besides the pain in his leg (which he was getting medicated for), he didn’t feel like he had cancer, like he was sick, no matter how many times people told him that he was.

 

Maybe that’s the real reason they’re giving him the chemotherapy.

 

Felix has complained a lot throughout the past eighteen years of his existence. He doesn’t know how many times he’s called his sisters annoying or insisted that his math teacher had it out for him. He spent so many collective hours of his life dragging his feet to do chores for his mom or whining about sore muscles after dance, but it shouldn’t need to be said that he’s never gone through anything quite like chemo. 

 

First, he’s always hated needles and getting stabbed never gets any less traumatic, let alone being forced to let it just sit in your arm for over an hour. Second, chemo isn’t just chemo, it’s also endless pills, which Felix has also always hated. Tablets for the nausea, inflammation, chills, weakness, fatigue, sleeplessness, and just about anything else that chemotherapy tends to do to your body, and he had to take them all. Felix swears he should be able to hear rattling whenever he moves. That wouldn’t be too terrible, but, third, the pills don’t do shit. The days following a cycle of chemotherapy remind Felix a lot of how you feel when you’re just starting to get over the flu. You’re not exactly actively getting sick, but the nausea is lingering, and you’re so exhausted and sore that even the simplest movements seem difficult. In addition to all that, you’re also cold all the time, you don’t want to eat anything, you get all these stupid painful sores in your mouth... It fucking sucks.

 

The worst thing, something that Felix swears he’ll remember for the rest of his life, no matter how long that ends up being, is the look in his mom’s eyes every time she sees him on one of the bad days. To be fair, Felix feels like his mom has been going through life these past couple months ready to burst into tears at any second, but it’s different when he’s really not feeling well. It’s permanently ingrained into the walls of his skull, the way her lips press into a tight line to hide how badly they’re trembling, the slight scrunch of her nose and brows, how her tears always fall whenever they make eye contact… she doesn’t look necessarily distraught in those moments, just broken, lost… helpless.

 

It’s those few days following chemo that are truly unbearable, but the remaining days of the week are okay, honestly. When it’s bad, it’s really pretty impossible for him to do much else than throw himself a pity party in his bed and think about how horrible everything’s become. The good days, though, he pretty much just hangs out watching Netflix or playing videogames. He stopped playing Overwatch because someone on his team goes to school with him and told everyone else about the ‘situation’, but his MineCraft server is still perfectly safe and his friends there do a really good job at pretending like they haven’t guessed that something’s wrong.

 

When his parents get home from work and his little sister, Olivia, gets home from school, things are a bit better. He’s getting to a point where things kind of feel normal, now. He honestly never used to spend much time with his family between dance practice and hanging out with his friends, but he doesn’t do either of those things anymore, so he’s been relying on them a lot more. Olivia and him will watch bad reality tv together before their mom comes home and makes her do her homework. Then he’ll sit with his parents and listen to them talk about their days while they cook, sometimes helping if he’s feeling particularly good. After dinner, he’ll usually spend more time with his little sister, show her funny memes or YouTube videos he found while she was at school. He’s actually been getting pretty close with her, recently. They never exactly hung out before Felix got sick, but she’s quickly become his only in-real-life friend and it’s really not too bad. She’s actually really funny and he never realized that they literally have the same stupid sense of humor. He can smile and joke around her like he hasn’t been able to with anyone else for the past few months.

 

Things with his parents have been a little less great, but he doesn’t really know what he can do about it. They always used to be pretty hands-off, and, now that he spends all his time at home, Felix is pretty sure they don’t really know what to do with him. He also realizes that it has to be pretty shitty to have your son get cancer, but it still hurts that they’ve seemed so distant recently. 

 

His mom has, obviously, been having a really hard time since they realized something was seriously wrong with him, and she isn’t the best at hiding it even if she refuses to admit it. She takes care of him, makes sure he takes all his medications and checks up on him on the bad days. She returns his smiles, even if they seem a little forced, and she never nags him anymore, even when he does stupid stuff like drinking orange juice straight from the jug or listening to his music way too loud late at night. He didn’t notice it much at first, but now that he’s adjusting, he’s starting to miss how natural and casual things used to feel. He hates that she’s so worried about him, that she feels like she needs to walk on eggshells around him.

 

His dad has been a lot more subtle. They had an okay relationship before, but, honestly, they hardly ever talked. It was fine, he loves his dad, they just have never had much in common. It didn’t help that he wasn’t exactly supportive of Felix focusing so much energy on dance and especially not him wanting to major in it in college. He guesses his dad ended up being right all along, now that he’s stuck here with no back up plan. But, regardless, it wasn’t like they fought or anything. Now, Felix is pretty sure his dad is ignoring him a bit. It probably isn’t malicious, but, like pretty much everyone in his life right now, he just doesn’t know what to say or how to act around him. When Felix engages him in a conversation directly, he responds, maybe a bit too stiffly for a casual conversation between a dad and his son, but that’s fine. Every other time that they’re in the same room, though, his dad doesn’t really seem to acknowledge his presence. Maybe it’s just easier for him to pretend that everything’s okay if he doesn’t have to interact with Felix more than necessary. Felix thinks he can learn to respect that.

 

His older sister, Rachel, is a whole other issue. She drove down from university after he got his diagnosis and they had one good talk at around one in the morning the night before she had to go back. It was mostly him holding her while she cried, at least somewhat desperate to get her to stop, but it was actually the only time someone had opened up to him and been completely honest about how the whole situation made them feel. It was uncomfortable, then, but Felix can really appreciate that now. 

 

The problem is that there’s been nothing but radio silence since Rachel went back to school. He knows that she still talks to his mom and Olivia at least once a week and has been getting updates on how he’s doing, but she hasn’t tried to contact him, at all. It fucking hurts, but Felix, again, has recently been trying really hard to be sympathetic towards everyone else. He knows that it’s an understatement to say that Rachel took the news poorly, he’s trying to be more selfless and just give her time.

 

It sucks, but he gets why he’s a bit hard to be around right now. Olivia’s honestly the only person who treats him like a normal human being, but he kind of has a feeling that she hasn’t completely grasped what exactly is happening. For everyone else, they’re scared and they know he isn’t okay, so it’s reasonable for them to get a little anxious, not know what to say that won’t upset him or make things worse.

 

Felix knows he’s not the same person he used to be; it’s pretty obvious, after all. He’s sad, if he thinks about it, but he really has been trying to be better. Being sad and angry isn’t going to make the cancer go away, though, to be fair, being happy and optimistic won’t work either. He’s just trying to make a conscious effort to not make himself more miserable than he has to be, as hard as that is to actually practice sometimes.

 

He can’t dance anymore, or ever again, more than likely, and that’s something that he genuinely doesn’t know if he’s ever going to get over. He knew he spent a lot of time practicing before, but he hadn’t realized just how much he needed that outlet until it was gone. He makes himself listen to his freestyle playlist every so often, maybe it’s a desperate attempt to drown out his thoughts or maybe it’s just to torture himself. If it makes him cry more often than not, that’s his business.

 

The doctors had explained their plan, or lack thereof, to him so many times. He has to go through this first round of chemotherapy, 8 cycles, before they’ll reassess whether “limb-salvaging surgery” is possible or if they’re going to have to take his leg. The tumor’s too big, from what he understands. If they tried to take it and enough surrounding healthy bits of his body to make sure they got it all, they don’t think that enough of his leg will be left to salvage, especially with the tumor being so close to his knee, but they want him to know that they’re doing everything they can to let him keep it. It all depends on how the tumor reacts to the chemotherapy treatments.

 

At first, the news didn’t seem real. It was just way too much for him to handle, so he mostly just shut down for a while. No matter how many times the doctors insinuated that he was lucky that the tumor was still localized, that after they removed it, however they decided to do that, the cancer would be gone, it didn’t keep Felix from feeling decidedly unlucky.

 

The thing is, whether they rebuild his leg or give him a fake one, he’s never going to have full strength or mobility back; they made that part very clear. All that means to Felix right now is that he’s never going to dance again, he can’t even begin to think about how much everything else is going to change. They told him he should absolutely be able to enjoy a full, happy life with either option; whatever they mean by that, it feels like some sort of sick joke.

 

So, at first, he was pretty numb. They asked if he wanted to talk to someone, a counselor, like talking about it would make a third, better solution magically appear. His mom tried to talk to him about it, once, too. He pulled out his best smile and promised her that he was okay, that it wasn’t a big deal, anyway.

 

His door had clicked shut and it was like the oxygen was suddenly sucked out of the room after her. It took him a while to even realize he was crying. He couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe; he has no idea how long he laid there, knees tucked into his chest on the floor of his bedroom, no exact recollection of how he even ended up down there, sobbing into the sleeve of his sweatshirt. His ragged breathing tore through his throat, abdomen muscles cramping, hands shaking violently; he completely lost control.

 

It felt like hours before he had started to come back to himself. Coherent thoughts slowly starting to trickle back in through the debilitating radio static in his brain. He slowly became conscious of the tears and snot coating his face and sleeve, eventually gathering himself up enough to wipe them away.

 

He managed to uncurl his body after some unknown amount of time. He just sprawled out on his floor, didn’t have the energy to push away the thoughts of how he couldn’t do it, couldn’t live without his leg; a third solution tugging at the corners of his mind for the first time. He fell asleep like that, waking up at some point in the middle of the night to drag his body into bed. He didn’t wake up again until the sound of Olivia coming home from school the next day roused him.

 

He splashed some water on his face before greeting her in the living room with a bright smile, “Ready for Real Housewives?”

 

If she heard him at any point the previous night, she didn’t mention it.


	2. Christopher Bang

It was 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, Felix’s fifth chemotherapy appointment, when he first met Christopher Bang.

 

Felix would never get used to chemo; it’s impossible. The only thing that changes with each appointment is that he feels just a little bit more like a veteran. He’s getting vaguely more confident walking through the hospital, talking with the nurses, but it never fixes the fact that Felix doesn’t want to be there.

 

In general, however, Felix is starting to think that he’s doing better. He’s smiling more, he’s pretty sure he is, at least. He isn’t sleeping or crying quite as much, though that isn’t to say that his sleep schedule is particularly healthy or that he doesn’t still have regular crying sessions when it’s late at night and he’s alone in his room. But crying’s therapeutic, he gets some of his best reflective thinking done while he’s crying, so it’d be kind of stupid to count that against him.

 

He’s getting better at handling things, he knows he is. He’s managing the pain better, both the emotional stuff and the shit that comes with chemo. He doesn’t spend all day hating himself, anymore. He’s starting to forgive his body for getting sick, his cells for not doing their jobs properly. It’s a big deal, he’s been taking some major steps forward in getting better.

 

The surgery issue is still an issue; it can’t not be one, after all. It’s huge for him that he doesn’t panic every time he thinks about it, though. He even managed to ask a few questions at the last meeting with his team; he’s pretty sure that’s a good sign, that he can kind of talk about it, now.

 

The one problem with Felix getting better is that he’s starting to really realize just how much he’s isolated himself these past few months. He has his family and the guys from his MineCraft server, but they’re literally the only people he talks to anymore. He has about a million regrets about burning bridges with his other friends as soon as things started going south, but that’s almost as big an issue as the surgery thing so it’s best not to think about that for too long.

 

The only other time that Felix has any sort of social interaction, the only time he ever leaves the house, is for doctors’ visits and his weekly chemo appointment. He talks to the doctors and nurses, sometimes, but, for as much time as Felix seemed to spend hanging around the oncology department, he hadn’t really met any other cancer patients. For starters, Felix didn’t want to be there and most of them seemed just as unhappy as he did, so not a great environment for making friends. Perhaps even more important, however, was that Felix had never seen another patient under 30 and most were at least in their 50’s. He can’t exactly be blamed for not jumping at the opportunity to converse with strangers who are older than his parents, no matter how desperate he gets for human contact.

 

Of course, Felix was still polite and would greet the other patients, trying to ignore the fact that they all gave him that same sympathetic look when they processed how young he must be. He couldn’t blame them because that was the one reason he was happy he was just old enough to be in the adult ward; the only thing sadder than an eighteen-year-old with cancer is anyone seventeen or under with cancer.

 

When Felix arrives for his regularly scheduled appointment, there was only one other patient, an elderly woman already in the rehydration stage. He’d seen her before but couldn’t remember her name, so he just smiled and nodded in her direction, choosing a seat on the opposite side of the small semi-circle of deceptively comfortable loungers. One of his favorite nurses met him there moments later. 

 

“How’s it going, Felix?” He gave her an unamused look, lips drawing into a slight pout, in response. Jeongyeon grinned back at him, knowingly.

 

Jeongyeon was always the youngest person there, excluding himself, being just a few years out of school. She was nice and would sit and chat with him sometimes on particularly quiet days, and she never bullshitted him or treated him like a little kid, which was pretty cool. Of course, he thinks this as he squeezes his eyes tightly shut, turning away and hesitantly offering his arm to her like he does every time, still unable to handle having to think about her setting everything up and stabbing him so his body could get pumped full of death chemicals. If Felix was ever going to pull the child card, it’d be in these first few minutes of his appointments. 

 

He’s still bracing himself for Jeongyeon’s assault when he hears the telltale creak of the recliner immediately to his right being claimed. Felix fully expects to open his eyes to see some generic old person who, for whatever reason, doesn’t realize that you’re meant to follow urinal rules when picking your treatment chair. Instead, he locks eyes with a smiling curly-haired boy who couldn’t be any more than a few years older than him. So, yeah, Felix is a little surprised, and it’s one-hundred percent due to the fact that there’s someone in treatment in his age range and has absolutely nothing to do with how handsome the guy is or how cute his dimples are.

 

The fact that he’s really attractive also has no impact on just how flustered Felix gets when he realizes just how awkward and embarrassing he probably looks in this moment, curled up like a baby so he doesn’t have to watch what Jeongyeon’s doing. It’s also not exactly fair that Felix looks like shit, per the unspoken dress code of treatment, while this guy looks perfectly presentable, good even, especially next to Felix’s combination sweatpants and hoodie groutfit. 

 

“Okay, Felix, you’re going to feel a slight pinch and all that jazz,” Felix tries to convince himself that Jeongyeon is a saint for giving him a distraction, but it’s hard to spin getting stabbed in any positive light.

 

And, yeah, the feeling of metal sinking into his skin is just as bad as ever.

 

“Don’t like needles?” The older boy’s attention was still on him when Felix peeled his eyes open.

 

“Not particularly, no,” He groaned in response eyes squeezing closed, yet again, as he tried to breath through the stinging in his arm and ignore the fact that there was a literal shard of metal piercing his skin.

 

“You get used to them eventually, I promise,” the guy laughed. Felix shot him a look because, first off, he literally won’t, and second, he’s at least a little sensitive to getting teased by attractive people, especially when he’s already feeling self-conscious about how he’s presenting himself, so the commentary isn’t particularly appreciated.

 

He lets himself shift position after a few moments with the needle in his arm had passed and the worst part was over, careful to keep his left arm out of his line of sight as he relaxed his back into the chair, facing forward. “I don’t think that’s how it works.”

 

The older boy seemed to think that was way funnier than it was, and Felix has to admit that his laugh is at least a little contagious, making it difficult to maintain his annoyed expression. He got to work unravelling his headphones; it was always tricky with one hand, but he always forgot to get them in order before being hooked up for treatment.

 

“Jeongyeon said your name was Felix, right? I’m Chris,” Felix looked back at the smiley guy, Chris, and, this time, he let his lips turn up just a bit as he nodded. “Yeah, nice to meet you, Chris,”

 

So, Felix never finished untangling his headphones.

 

He learned that Chris had been diagnosed with colon cancer last year and that he’d gotten a bit of a break from chemotherapy to take part in this clinical trial that didn’t make his cancer worse, but didn’t help him, either, leading his doctors to put him back on the traditional treatment plan. He learned all about Chris’ two younger siblings, Hannah and Lucas, and their family dog, Berry; how he’d been taking online classes from the local university, slowly trying to finish his History degree since he’d gotten bored of sitting around and waiting for his cancer to go away. He found out that Chris really likes making music and has a SoundCloud rap group with two of his friends, Jisung and Changbin, that he works on whenever he has free time. He also learned that he gets embarrassed whenever he’s reminded that most people, Felix included, tend to think SoundCloud rappers are at least a little lame.

 

It was a huge relief when Felix felt himself relaxing into the conversation. There was something about Chris that was just really magnetic; it made it really hard for him to stay grumpy about thinking he was giving off a bad first impression. He also had no idea how comfortable it would be to talk to someone close to his age that was going through something similar, someone who could understand.

 

So, Felix told him about his sisters, his parents, about how he’d technically just graduated even though he didn’t walk and had missed the last month of school. He left out some of the details when he told Chris about the Osteosarcoma, not wanting to mess up the good mood he’d been put in, but the elder didn’t pry. He talked about the types of shows and games he’s been into lately and Chris gets back at him for his SoundCloud rapper comments by teasing him for his taste in anime and the fact that he unironically plays MineCraft as a grown-ass adult.

 

Chris nodded sympathetically when he explained why he hadn’t played Overwatch in a long time, even though it had been his favorite. When Felix mentioned that his favorite character to play was Lucio, he perked up and said that his team had been talking about booting one of their support members since he was never on and maybe Felix could play with them, instead. No one can blame him if he falls just a bit in love.

 

It was so nice, literally the first time in over a month that he’d had a genuine conversation with someone around his age. Felix almost missed Jeongyeon swapping the treatment drip bag for the rehydration cocktail after an hour, too busy laughing at Chris’ dramatic retelling of the Pazzi Conspiracy which he was writing a paper on for one of his classes. 

 

Chris was funny and he didn’t seem to ever stop smiling; it was a bit addictive, watching his face light up and listening to the words tumble progressively faster from his mouth when he talked about a topic he was really into. It’d been a long time since Felix had clicked with someone new so quickly, the last time probably being when he met Hyunjin…

 

When Felix got unhooked from the IV, he lingered, wanting to finish their mini debate that got started when Chris mentioned that he sometimes prefers to read manga over watching anime. Felix was totally winning and there wasn’t anyone waiting on his seat, so he figured it was reasonable.

 

They exchanged numbers and steam IDs as they walked out together and the whole thing was very casual really. Felix totally wasn’t freaking out about getting a really nice, cute boy’s number or hearing him say that they should hang out sometime (like, actually hang out, not even in the hospital).

 

He waved at Chris with a stupid smile on his face as he got into his father’s car and that smile stayed firmly in place the whole way home. He was pretty sure he was really confusing his dad, but the other man stayed silent and, for once, it didn’t bother Felix at all.

 

Later that night, his regularly scheduled post-chemo self-loathing session was interrupted by Chris sending him the link to his SoundCloud. Felix flipped through their tracks until he was certain his migraine was going to make him blow chunks if he didn’t turn it off. He followed the account before pulling his messenger app back up.

 

‘Okay so maybe I was a bit wrong when I said all soundcloud rappers are lame……’

‘HSDGSHDFF IM SO GLAD!!!!~’ 

‘Yikes I take it back’

‘NOOOOOO’ 

‘lmao but seriously these songs are really good!!!!!~’

‘This is the best moment of my life Felix Lee’ 

 

Felix was absolutely not grinning into his pillow like an idiot. He was totally only in there because the light from his phone screen was making the migraine worse. He definitely didn’t like Chris like that. He was just a new buddy, a new pal, a new bro… he’s just a person who happens to be really cool and who Felix really wants as a friend.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to those who left comments on the last chapter!
> 
> Twitter: [BenGene97](https://twitter.com/BenGene97)  
> CC: [BenGene](https://curiouscat.me/BenGene)

**Author's Note:**

> Twitter: [BenGene97](https://twitter.com/BenGene97)  
> CC: [BenGene](https://curiouscat.me/BenGene)


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